Tijs Dragtsma (1992) - A Mask Kept From Breath

A hand rises from the dark and closes over a diver's mask, the way a mask closes over a breath before it is held back. Nothing behind the glass looks out. Where a face and a reflection should sit, the surface stays shut, and the whole gesture becomes about withholding rather than seeing.

The work keeps only what carries that gesture: the shape of the fingers, the curve of the mask, the printed pattern at the wrists, all drawn as a field of fine scratches. Everything else, skin tone, expression, the room behind the hand, is let go into the deep blue that fills the rest of the piece.

Blue carries the meaning here. It is the colour of held breath and closed water, of a distance kept between the world and whatever is being protected underneath that mask. It cools the image, the way a mask cools a face it seals off from air.

No paint. No print. No ink. The image is formed by controlled scratches set into the surface of deep blue coloured mirror glass, not applied onto it. The marks are always present, in daylight as in darkness. Light does not create the image, it sharpens it, deepening the contrast where the scratches catch and shine.

Around the hand and the mask, the coloured mirror glass keeps doing its other job: it reflects the room, and with it, the person standing in front of the work. Study the mask too long and your own face starts to gather in that same blue field, close to where the mask's would be, so that looking at the piece becomes a small trade of one held breath for another.

This work continues the Art on Mirror series by Tijs Dragtsma, in which scratched imagery is set into coloured mirror glass and the viewer becomes part of the work. A visual language where damage is not destruction, but structure, and where the mirror turns looking into taking part.

"A mask kept from breath, and a face kept from the mirror."

gezien: In the finished work a raised hand presses a rounded, goggle eyed mask against a dark blue mirrored surface, its round lenses, ribbed filter and patterned cuffs traced in fine glowing white lines. Everything outside those scratched contours, including where a face or reflection would sit behind the mask's black lenses, stays deep untouched blue.

About Art on Mirror – Blue

Art on Mirror is a body of work in which the image is scratched into coloured mirror glass, and the world in front of the work becomes part of it. Every line is cut into a deep blue mirrored surface of acrylic glass. The scratches are always there, bright against the colour, while the surface around them keeps reflecting the room, the daylight and the person looking.

From a distance the image reads clear and complete, a pale figure held in a field of blue. Step closer and the work opens into a delicate web of individual marks, fine and deliberate, each one essential to the whole. Behind and between them the mirror does what a mirror does. It carries the room and the viewer into the composition, so the surroundings in the work change with the place where it hangs, while the image itself stays firmly in place.

Light does not create the image. It sharpens it. The blue ground absorbs and reflects, the scratched lines catch and hold, and under a focused spotlight the contrast deepens until the figure takes on a sculptural, almost luminous quality. In softer light the colour comes forward and the work settles into a quieter register, without ever losing its subject.

Blue is the colour of night, of deep water and of quiet distance. That is the emotional ground every work in this series is set against, and the subjects are chosen to belong to it.

Art on Mirror continues the scratched imagery of Art with Scratch by Tijs Dragtsma on a new ground. Where the black works draw their power from absence, these draw it from reflection. The viewer is no longer only looking at the work. The viewer is in it.

About the Artist

My name is Tijs Dragtsma, founder of TD Fine Art Studio.

As an artist, I am driven by a constant desire to explore new visual languages. I do not see art as a fixed style, but as an evolving field of discovery where material, structure, light and emotion come together.

My work often begins with a simple question. How can a material speak in a new way. How can hardness become intimacy. How can precision create emotion. That search lies at the heart of everything I create.

Within TD Fine Art Studio, each body of work is approached as its own world, with its own logic, atmosphere and visual identity. Some works are built through rhythm, repetition and structure. Others emerge through absence, shadow, reflection or tension. What connects them is a shared commitment to originality, clarity and emotional presence.

I am fascinated by contrast. Between strength and fragility. Between control and feeling. Between what is visible and what is left open to interpretation. My goal is not simply to make an image, but to create a work that holds attention, invites reflection and continues to reveal itself over time.

TD Fine Art Studio is the space in which these explorations come together. It is not only a studio, but an evolving artistic universe shaped by curiosity, precision and the ambition to create work that feels distinctive, intentional and alive.